Conceptualisation of co-creation and co-production

Background
Creating and producing welfare with citizens has been trendy governmental rhetoric for the last decades, involving partnerships between municipalities, civil societies, and the citizens, aimed to mobilize citizens’ and civil societies’ resources. Co-creation and co-production are topical approaches to involve citizens in improving municipal health services or contributing to service production to balance scarce municipal resources and better target services to citizens’ needs. However, challenging in applicating the concept in practice has resulted in several new definitions being applied within Health and Social Care research. This has led to studies failing to define the concept or to involve citizens in the process. Thus, we aim to clarify the co-creation and co-production concepts to underpin their applicability when involving older people in community health services.

Methods
We draw on theoretical knowledge of co-creation and co-production based on Brandt and Honnigh (2018) conceptualization, combined with results from a scoping review, which explored co-production within health services among older people. We searched six databases across health and social science, 22 studies met the inclusion criteria.

Results
A theoretical agreement exists on how to conceptualize co-creation and co-production. However, the scoping review found that co-production is randomly applied across different theoretical concepts, such as public involvement, co-creation, and co-production. Co-production was applied in 1) intervention and service development, 2) service provision, and 3) the design and process of research.

Conclusions
Contributing to disseminating the concepts may help qualify the applicability within community health services among older people. There remains an unexplored potential in activating resources and involving citizens through co-creation and co-production. However, concept clarity is needed to underpin co-creation and co-production processes.